The whole Shuttle program was riddled with problems caused mostly by schedules and egos.
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...and an intrinsically flawed design that placed the shuttle alongside the main fuel tank of the main booster and the two solid propellent boosters. This created two potential fatal flaws, each of which caused the catastrophic failure on two of the shuttles.
In earlier designs like Saturn or Atlas, the crew capsule sat atop the boosters and the capsule included a launch escape system (LES) which could propel the capsule up and away from a failing or exploding booster. The challenger took the brunt of the explosion of the two solid booster engines.
The main fuel tank on a liquid propelled rocket inevitably sheds ice buildup on launch as water freezes out on the surface due to the chilled liquid rocket propellent. When the capsule rides atop the booster, the ice falls harmlessly. In the case of the later Columbia shuttle disaster, chunks of ice fractured or damaged the heat absorbing tiles on the bottom of the shuttle. There was enough damage that a hole in the shielding allowed the superheated air of reentry to penetrate the hull destroying the shuttle.
In the case of the later Columbia shuttle disaster, chunks of ice fractured ...
The whole Shuttle program was riddled with problems caused mostly by schedules and egos.
I disagree. The shuttle program worked exactly as advertised/designed/built. It was designed, built and sold as a 98% effective system. 126 flights. 124 successful ones.
98.4% success rate. Just what they paid for. They would not risk a 95% success rate and could not afford a 100% success rate. That was the only way they were ever going to have a shuttle fleet.
The boosters did not explode. The leaky seal burned through a support strut and caused the booster to rotate into the main fuel tank.
And to add to the many elements of bad design:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/railroad.html
“Getting the 12-foot-wide, 150-ton segments to the launch site is only possible by rail.”
Now why is that? Couldn’t they have taken them on a barge? (And if they did, would they have needed to make the rocket in a whole series of segments each as long as a railcar? Has there ever been another rocket that travelled on rail cars in segments?)
Nope, because instead of giving the contract to a company anywhere on the coast or a navigable river, they gave it to Morton Thiokol in one of the 16 US states that are entirely landlocked Utah. Now what else is in Utah? Orrin Hatch, the powerful senator who spent a good bit of his career shilling for that company.
I read an article years ago saying that the space shuttle was the most skillfully designed project in American history. It managed to require contracts and jobs in every state that hosted a key deciding congressman or senator.
Correct. It’s no coincidence that the current crop of launch vehicles have gone back to the old configuration.
It's widely accepted now that the Challenger astronauts survived the explosion and died when the orbiter impacted the ocean. They were alive for the entire fall.
“and an intrinsically flawed design”
The original concept had 2 reusable vehicles, a booster with the orbiter riding on top, much like the final transport configuration with the 747. It was meant to take off and return to an airport. The final kluge config was a budget decision. IMHO, the biggest lesson learned from the shuttle was how dumb it is to make a space ship that looks like an airplane. What SpaceX is doing is so much better. Just look at what they are doing with this new Starship. They are going to be landing all stages soon, not just the first stage. It is just remarkable out of the box thinking.